Tuesday Worlds started back up for the season. Maybe you’ve heard of it – and I truly feel sorry for you if you haven’t – because Tuesday Worlds is the greatest bike ride on earth.
How, the uninformed rube asks, could Tuesday Worlds – an unsanctioned, uncontrolled, irregular, informal, chaotic, quasi-illegal, ad hoc gathering of amateur cyclists on the roads east of humble Birmingham, Alabama, be the greatest bike ride on earth?
Tuesday Worlds, proper name “Tuesday Night World Championships,” Strava-acronym TNW, may sound familiar to you, particularly if you have ridden The Shootout in Tucson or The Bustop in Boulder or the Wednesday Night Worlds in your city or any of 10,000 other similar established local beatdown rides that take place around the world. It is a universal truth that whenever and wherever two cyclists gather, one of them is going to try to beat the other one to an imaginary finish line.
I once took my bike with me on a work trip to Dalton, Georgia, population 30,000, thinking that maybe I’d have a chance to ride; nine and a half hours later I was cross-eyed and gasping, chasing down attacks from people I had never met, doing 35 mph on roads I had never ridden, racing for a finish line that may not have actually existed as a fixed point in reality. The ride was called the “Milkshake” and ended at a barn. It was the Milan-San Remo of Dalton, Georgia.
Tuesday Worlds starts at 5:30PM from the parking lot behind the former location of the bike shop, near the new location of the bike shop and down the block from the other bike shop, by the coffee shop. Most people don’t start at the start, and the start usually doesn’t happen exactly at the start time. Instead, at about 5:32, give or take, a dozen or so cyclists of wildly varying ages and abilities start rolling slowly away from the start area, tentatively cross a major US Highway, duck under an overpass of another major highway, jog on a sidewalk to hit an access road behind the zoo, roll through some neighborhoods, and swing by the clocktower by the Mexican place around 5:45ish. At all points of this meandering journey, other cyclists materialize out of nowhere, new fighters spawning into the arena randomly with no fanfare.
“Small turnout tonight.”
“Nah, there’s Will with two or three of the Skyway boys.”
“Scott and a bunch of others are at Clocktower.”
“Hey, some of the Montevallo kids are warming up on 78.”
And so on.
By the time the ride makes its way to Highway 78, it has metastasized into a formidable and threatening mass, sometimes approaching 75 or more riders.
Is it safe, practical, or even possible to take 75 riders on an unsanctioned, 40-mile full-drop race-paced ride near dusk on open, uncontrolled roads, on the rural outskirts of a mid-sized American city?
Lol. LMAO, even. No. No, of course it isn’t. And yet …
A brief history of eternity
Some history first: Tuesday Worlds started back in the dark prehistoric mists of time – back before clipless pedals and STI shifting, if you can conceive of such depravity – by riders whose names some of us still know, somehow, the way you remember the names of the first four Presidents or the Great Lakes. Scott and Bill and Seth and Joe and Brock and Terry were there, and Hardwick was there because Hardwick is always there, because Hardwick is eternal. They don’t give stars and stripes to just anybody and Hardwick has them on several jerseys.
There is a picture hanging in a shop in Birmingham – it’s a bit blurry, captured with ancient alien “film” technology, and the bikes have strange skinny tubes and visible cables – of a large pack of riders on a nondescript road. The facial expressions (grim, pained, joyful, hard, anguished) tell you all you need to know about the pace and intensity of the ride. The Elders – Bill and Hardwick and Seth and Joe – are there, and Bob Roll is there, and this Bob Roll is not the malaprop-spewing goofball bantering with Phil while the early break goes. This Bob Roll is skinny and fast and lethal and laughing and on Motorola. Yes, that Motorola. He’s laughing because it’s Tuesday Worlds, and Bob Roll, who has raced the freakin' Giro d’Italia, knows that Tuesday Worlds is the greatest bike ride in the world.
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